The digital compact cassette could also elicit opposition from record companies and music publishers.

Many people lined up to hear the new digital compact cassettes under development by Philips.

Until now, the Philips digital compact cassette has seemed to garner more support from record companies.

Those "advancements" were the digital compact cassette and the minidisk.

The failure of the digital compact cassette and minidisk bear witness to that.

The battle will pit the recordable mini-disk against the digital compact cassette.

The Philips demonstration was accompanied by the release of statements from several record companies supporting the digital compact cassette.

Digital tape players now start at about $900, several hundred dollars more than the anticipated price of the digital compact cassette machines.

Its latest hope, the digital compact cassette, an audio tape with CD-quality sound, is off to a slow start.

He said one advantage was that prerecorded digital compact cassettes could be made on high-speed duplicating machines, cutting production costs.

But the devices differ in that the Philips system, known as the digital compact cassette, will be able to play conventional analog cassettes.

The digital compact cassette is, in effect, a digital version of the conventional audio cassette tape.

The competition between the two new music formats, Sony's minidisk and the Philips digital compact cassette, is one reason neither system has done very well.

Indeed, the deleterious effect of high-order compression on music has been amply demonstrated by both the digital compact cassette and the mini-disk.

Unlike Philips's digital compact cassettes, the digital audio tape is incompatible with existing tapes because of its smaller size.

By late spring we will be hearing a lot about DCC (Digital Compact Cassette).

Two new music formats, Sony's mini-disk and Philips' digital compact cassette, both got off to slow starts in the Christmas shopping season.

But far from surpassing the compact disk, neither the digital compact cassette nor the minidisk even approached the CD's performance standard.

Cutting Some Costs There are several reasons the music industry might support digital compact cassettes over digital audio tape, according to audio experts.

Next year, around the time that the mini disk appears on the market, Philips is bringing out the digital compact cassette, or DCC.

Philips N.V., meanwhile, plans to introduce a digital version of the venerable audio-cassette tape, to be called the digital compact cassette.

The digital compact cassette, or DCC, uses cassette tapes that are the same size as analog cassettes.

A failed digital tape recording system was the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC).